No, there’s more nuance to it. And, lucky you, I feel like spilling it all over my blog.
This is me at one of my more negative moments. The other end of the spectrum can be just as intense. But right at the moment, things are pretty bleak over at words’ end.
I’ve been thinking about feminism. It’s hard not to these days, really. Jill is this awesome, shiny, curly-lock’ed powerhouse of a blogging theorist and head of her department, and writes on feminist topics to do with both politics and with her work. The misbehaving posse are eloquent and on point without coming across as gratuitously bitter, by which I personally am inspired. Hanna is kicking all kinds of arse as a Debian developer and advocate for women in computing.
Humanities computing is by no means a boys’ club. I don’t have any actual statistics, and it’s likely that men do outnumber women in the field, just like most (any?) other academic fields. But I’ve never felt shut out because I’m female; and certainly there is no lack of role models to follow.
Ethan and I talk about gender, its physiology and its politics, quite a lot. In him I have found the kind of feminist I hope every man – and woman – would be. He is well read and astute in general, and his interest in evolutionary biology has led to some very interesting conversations about how gender differences have evolved, how they’re expressed in other animals, how different human societies deal with them.
(As an aside, have you ever read Shanshan Du’s Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs? It’s a great read. The Lahu have their problems, but they’ve got the gender stuff worked out.)
OK, so do we all agree here that men and women are different? Because we are, right? In many, many respects. A tiny change in physiology (and it really is tiny, all things considered) results, in most of us, in different attitudes, different… orientations. In most of us. Lately gender identity has come to the political forefront, and we’ve discovered that it’s not quite so black-and-white.
I am most decidedly female. Perhaps a little more outspoken than some, perhaps a bit harsh at times, but a woman. I watch myself behave in ways that have been pegged as stereotypically female, and find that this is where I want to be.
So, here’s where I want to be: I want to be secondary.
Seriously. I want to be someone’s assistant. I make a good administrator. I am happier making sure that things run smoothly than I am writing papers. This bothers me on a fundamental level.
It’s possible that these are years of being a student speaking: I’m tired of being a student. Even now, on a leave of absence and with a “real job,” I’m a student and will need to write a dissertation by something like May of 2007. I’m sick of writing papers, because I don’t feel like expressing new opinions. Doing research is absolutely equivalent in my head to proving myself – to professors, to colleagues, to myself. I hate it. I hate the insecurity, and I hate even more my conclusion that this insecurity is not the result of The Man puttin’ me down. Nobody’s been putting me down. Nobody but me.
There’s a conflict here: most of me doesn’t feel put down when I think of a life as a mother and keeper of the homestead, possibly working part-time making food for people or pulling espresso shots (both being alternate-reality dreams of mine, that I will quite possibly pursue when I retire… or sooner). Most of me has been actively developing this aversion to putting myself on the line, proving myself to anyone. A large part of me wants to only ever do for money what I already know how to do, and doesn’t want to learn anything new.
For money. That’s a crucial thing. I don’t think I could stop reading, ever. Learning new things, fiddling with XSLT, finding cool ways to keep my occasional students of Italian excited about the language, all these things are great. As long as I choose to do them.
Classic, huh?
The feminist in me is all up in arms because of this. I’m capable of More Than That. (What in the seven hells does that mean?)
Goddamnit, I love humanities computing. I love my current job. I love gradually getting a wider and wider perspective on the wonder of human communication via language. The parallels between us and people who lived hundreds, thousands of years ago are often unexpected and always great fun to discover. So why am I periodically so torn up, why do I want to hide and never tell anyone who professionally matters to me what I’m thinking? Why am I terrified of this?
The cards are stacked in my favor, here. Ever since I decided not to pursue the Italian Studies PhD any longer I’ve been happy in academe. It’s been home. The papers I’ve given have mostly failed to suck; my boss has recently called me a dynamo to a third party; my doctoral committee have been very supportive of this unorthodox track of a PhD in humanities computing. Gosh darn it, that oughta count for something.
I’m going to finish this two-year gig, and immediately after that I’ll finish the PhD, and these things aren’t true because I’m feeling the need to prove something. They’re true because I want to do this.
But I’m terrified, and am tired of being so scared, and every time it comes back it’s stronger and harder to deal with. A large, visceral part of me is screaming every time I realize that I’ve put myself out there and seem to have no energy to see it through. The fact that this happens more often when my hormones are all out of whack is only important to a point, since (a) this isn’t an absolute correlation, and (b) the hormone jumps don’t make any of this shit less real.
Energy always comes in the end, from someplace or another. But right now, I just want to hide.
Academe is a lonely place, but for better or worse it’s home. I’ve only got one life. How do I know the wisest way to spend it that will also make me consistently happy?
[Re-reading this, it occurs to me: among other things, what I actually want is acknowledgment on the part of Society At Large of the importance and relevance of my work to itself. Fat chance.]
The challenge here is that you do, to some extent, have to manage the impression your colleagues have of you. The tricky part is that this sort of self-modeling tends to collapse into self-consciousness.
Another element is that, until and unless you get tenure, your actual position *will* be tenuous, i.e. insecure. Options that mitigate that insecurity by staying well within your known competencies are understandably attractive.
All that being said, the merit of your work is not simply an index of how much people like you/your ideas. Many brilliant scholars were largely unrecognized during their lifetimes, especially women. Part of what helps me with insecurities like these is recognizing that not only do my colleagues not understand the true significance of my work, I don’t either. Therefore, spending a lot of time on worrying about whether your thoughts are “good enough” is ultimately fruitless because you can’t ever really know.
As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the work you are doing has the potential to revolutionize not just the way that scholarship is done in the humanities, but *all* narrative frameworks and their interpretation; something that covers law, history, and scientific explanations.
The irony is that I often feel the urge to just be your cabana boy; I want to devote all my energies to maintaining the household, programming RolandTheSoftware for you, and helping your ideas gain the foothold in the broader world that they deserve.
I think, in the end, you can have it all; you can be the kick-ass, WorldChanging scholar, devoted mother and fantastic wife (heck, you already have two out of three). The hard part is that you’ll never know exactly how you are any of them.
I can’t relate to the academic lifestyle and its apparently endless ups and downs, but a lot of what you’re saying here jives with what my sister complains of in pursuing her doctorate: needing more validation, more of a way to feel that your work is valuable. I suspect that this is something that many grad students feel, whatever their gender.
Hey. Comment link for the previous entry isn’t functional from my end, so I’m leaving my joke here.
A skeleton walks into a bar, and orders a beer and a mop.
=)
“very supportive of this unorthodox track of a PhD in humanities computing. Gosh darn it, that oughta count for something.”
And it does, if anyone’s keeping count.
I want to be a househusband. Raise kids, cook, clean, take care of crises at home, maybe work part-time at the local library, never come up with an original thought about anything NEEDED, just about stuff on the side. When I’m in RPGs, I want to be a player, not the gamemaster. I love being on bottom. Thinking and being proactive all the damn time is exhausting, and much less fun than it could be.
It’s not about male and female. I dare say it’s about innate energy level, extroversion, and how long we’ve been at this $#!t. It’s about dealing with our psychological baggage at the same time. It’s about a lot of things, but ovaries and testes have only the slightest influence on wanting life to be easier.
Hey — I don’t have anything pithy to add, but I’d like to talk to you about this. I have similar, though clearly not identical, issues.
Vika – As Lois Griffin so eloquently put it: feminism is about choice. To me, feminism is not just about choice, but about choosing to be happy. In the bad old days, if you will, women were not given the choice to be anything other than homemakers, baristas (or the like) and mothers. In the good new days, women have the choice to be lawyers, academics, mechanics, and so on, but a choice to be happy as a barista, homemaker, or mother is frowned apon. That’s fucked up. Feminism should empower you to do what makes you happy; if being an assistant makes you happy, then be an assistant. “More Than That” is nothing short of sexism – it’s the sort of thing men might say to each other about a man in an assistant position, and it’s total fucking bullshit.
Anyway, I hope you feel better. In some ways, I think the ultimate academic achievement would be to pursue all of this knowledge, then work as a clerk for the rest of your life – that way, you’d take all of the good from academia (pursuit of knowledge) and leave all of the bad behind (the politics, self-importance, and intellectual masturbation).
Vika – I’ve never seen it as being secondary, I see it more as being collaborative, which I think is one of the great advantages of being a woman in academia (even if that collaborative tendency is a result of millennia of being stuck in the subordinate position, as it were.) We don’t necessarily have to buy into that patriarchal vertical hierarchy stuff any more. And of course right-minded men don’t, either.
It’s abundantly clear to all of us who work with you that you are intellectual powerhouse, driving force, cheerleader, and chivvy-er-along in one (and scuse my mixing of architectural, mechanical and occupational metaphors!)
Would write more, but am too busy Having It All, writing tomorrow’s lecture after putting my son to bed…